What for want of a more definite term I must call my mind was
fixed upon my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but
because of their fascinating holiday-promising aspect. I had been
obtaining my information as to Europe at second hand, from friends good
enough to come down now and then to see us. They arrived with their
pockets full of crumpled newspapers, and answered my queries casually,
with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest. And
yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become
chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less
conscious of it. It had wearied out one's attention. Who could have
guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature
rehearsal of the great world-drama, the reduced model of the very
passions and violences of what the future held in store for the Powers of
the Old World? Here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of
that possibility, while they watched Old Europe stage-managing fussily by
means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its
awaiting fate. It was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of
guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; race,
liberation, justice--and the same mood of trivial demonstrations. One
could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg. "You mean Petrograd,"
would say the booking clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a
friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some _cafe turc_ at the
end of his lunch.

"Monsieur veut dire Cafe balkanique," the patriotic waiter corrected him
austerely.

I will not say that I had not observed something of that instructive
aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its first and in its second
phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to
see in it the evidence of my alarmist cynicism. As to alarm, I pointed
out that fear is natural to man, and even salutary. It has done as much
as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a
charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a
charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of
disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty bearing--a
sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be thought a mere jaunty
cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the
usual arguments. It was pointed out to me that t